There was a time when I aspired to post weekly, and then bi-weekly, maybe once a month, and now. . . very little. That’s not to say I haven’t been busy.  I’ve moved a lot of content over to a research website at http://goring.org, with a nice picture of the Wicked Witch of the East (that ought to be properly credited, I’ll fix that. . . ). I’ve also moved my social advocacy stuff to…

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This is the first time I’ve really been to the American Association of Geographers meeting. Last year it was held in Chicago, which is really close to Madison, and I was invited to speak at a session called “The View from the Anthropocene” organized by two great Geographers from the University of Connecticut, Kate Johnson and Megan Hill, but I had the kids & really only spent the morning there.  I’m pretty sure there was…

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In science we work, more often than not, in teams.  Whether we work with one other individual, five individuals, or interact at workshops with hundreds of strangers, it’s important that we are clearly understood.  Clarity is critical, especially when explaining complex concepts.  KISS is my second favorite acronym, even if I can’t keep to the principle (NEFLIS, a camping acronym, is my favorite – No Excuse for Living in Squalor just because you’re out in…

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I’m heading to AGU early this year, part of the Neotoma Annual Meeting at Berkeley.  We’ve recently been awarded an NSF EarthCube Integrated Activities award to harmonize Neotoma and the Paleobiology Database (and other allied paleobiological archives), but we’ve also made some big gains in working with allied Plio-Pleistocene databases and researchers across the globe in...

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Figure 1. That’s really a lot of pollen. A lot of pollen. Image by Brooke Novak It’s no secret to members of the Canadian Association of Palynologists (join now!) that the study of organic-walled microfossils is the most interesting branch of science, but it may come as a surprise to some of our colleagues. The...

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Open data in the sciences is an aspirational goal, and one that I wholeheartedly agree with. The efforts of EarthCube (among others) to build an infrastructure of tools to help facilitate data curation and discovery in the Earth Sciences have been fundamental in moving this discussion forward in the geosciences, and at the most recent...

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I’ve been very lucky to work with great co-authors over the past few years, and this year is no exception. Along with a raft of papers we are about to submit I just got notified that a paper we submitted a few months ago is now online in the Annals of the Association of American...

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I’m involved in a Plenary Workshop this year, organized by some great folks at UNC-Chapel Hill.  I’m privileged to have been asked by these students, al of whom are currently Ph.D candidates.  They’ve taken a great idea and turned it into something that will be an excellent Plenary Session, with some (hopefully) long lasting impact....

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If you’ve ever been in doubt about whether you chose the right programming language to learn I want to lay those concerns to rest here. For many scientists, particularly in Biology or the Earth Sciences, there is often a question about whether you should be learning R, Python, Matlab or something else.  Especially when you’re...

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I am by no means an expert on the subject of under-representation in the sciences.  There are some excellent academic bloggers who have done some great work in discussing issues around race and gender in academia (including DNLee, the tweeters at and using #BlackandSTEM – EDIT: this is an amazing post by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein over at medium.com)....

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